Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. If you want to learn a language or you teach a language you’ve come to the right place. Join Janina each week for tips, resources and advice for making engaging language learning happen any time, anywhere.

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. This week I want to share with you my amazing guest, Dr. Tamara Walker. She’s doing some amazing work. She’s a Professor of History, published author, she’s published numerous times in The Guardian and she’s got a couple of books coming out with, I believe, Crown next year. Brilliant woman who’s doing amazing work in the world, and I’m just going to let the interview speak for itself. We’re going to put some links. She talks about her foundation and the amazing work that she’s doing and how we can help out. Again, thank you for listening.

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. This week I have a guest who has some amazing projects going on and writing and books, and there’s so much to talk about. This is Dr. Tamara Walker, yes? Okay, and can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your teaching, and-

Sure. Yeah. So, I am a Professor of History. I teach Latin American history at the University of Toronto and I also co-founded and co-direct a non-profit called The Wandering Scholar, which is focused on making international education opportunities accessible to high school students from low income backgrounds. And those are kind of related pursuits; my day job and the non-profit, since I wouldn’t have become a historian of Latin America had I not had an early experience of travel in my school when I went to Mexico. And it really changed the course of my life. It led to me studying abroad in college and pursuing the career that I have now, so it’s with that in mind that I, along with my partner, Shannon O’Halloran Keating, decided to found this organization to make those experiences available to students like us.

That’s amazing. So, I believe that you grew up in Colorado, is that right?

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Did you do your undergraduate in Colorado and then sort of went… Is that right?

No, I did my undergraduate in Philadelphia. I went to the University of Pennsylvania for undergrad. So, from the time I turned 18, I left home and have continued to just be away from Colorado.

And then, but you also… Congratulations, that’s Ivy League, that’s quite an accomplishment. Did you tell me that you studied in Mexico as a high school student, is that right?

Yeah.

And this is kind of what everything… Can you tell us about that, please?

Yeah. So, I went to this high school that had an interim program, is what they called it, and it was basically a way to spend Spring Break doing something productive or constructive. And so, students had the chance to either work at a shelter, a homeless shelter, a domestic violence shelter, to do different types of community service projects, to hone their interest in theater or the arts, or if they had taken language classes, to study overseas. And so, my first year of the program I was able to go to Mexico and then I studied French the next year basically to be able to go on the class trip to Paris and to Lyon. So it was through this amazing program that my high school had offered, that, had I not gone to that school and not gotten a scholarship to go to that school, I never would’ve had those opportunities. Because I started out at a public school in my neighborhood in Denver that didn’t even have language classes, much less these kinds of programs.

Really?